A Samuel Beckett fan, Zoë Cobb, runs the gauntlet of the playwright’s notoriously protective estate in her promenade piece, Wild Worlds: V at Waterloo’s Vault Festival. Half-way through, the audience is beckoned towards a red light into which an actress in black lipstick emerges, the rest of her face covered by the hands of an actor standing behind. She delivers two minutes of Beckett’s Not I, about a woman’s loveless existence. Other unapproved productions get pulled for such impudence. Elsewhere, there’s an excerpt from Sarah Kane’s Crave: “I want to not laugh at your jokes ... kiss your back and stroke your skin ...” For Cobb, such borrowing is in good faith, an expression of the concept of “Deep Democracy”, whereby importance is accorded to a spectrum of voices and points of reference. “We’re living at a time when we absorb so many pieces of material. What’s powerful is what bubbles up and remains in the memory.” Arriving at the cavernous venue, the audience can glimpse curvaceous dancers through fog. But rather than steamy bacchanal, an Irish MC and a pretty Italian and Catalan couple convey a narrative arc from falling head-over-heels in love to relationship meltdown. There are strong stage images in Patricia Langa’s character, hurling household items for Alessandro Marzotto’s besotted lover to pick up; and a topless Langa flailing in a satin sea that ends picturesquely twisted around her body. It’s a devised piece, but “the theme comes from me”, says Cobb, after exploring the Fifth Canto of Dante’s Inferno with her Italian fiancé. Cobb trained with the Royal Ballet until she was nine, did theatre in Calgary and performed with the Moscow State Circus. Her troupe of animal-costumed dancers, The Artful Badger, emerged at Secret Garden Party in 2007, funding itself through lavish parties; she’s now tired of the latter, handing financial responsibility to a co-director, but remains fascinated by the dynamic between audiences and spectacle. “I love getting people in the room. Take tonight – you have to fight for your place, find out what’s happening... That’s the only way live arts can survive – if people can invest themselves, be interested; be aware,” she says. It’s a strong manifesto – so long as the guardians of textual integrity don’t spoil it.